BEIJING (Reuters) - China, reeling from a series of
scandals over the safety of its food, will pull thousands of
pesticides from the shelves to improve regulation of their sale
and use, the Agriculture Ministry said on Wednesday.

Farmers are faced with some 23,000 products sold under
16,000 names, leaving them unclear as to what they are spraying
on their crops and in what quantities.

"Right now there are more than 1,700 in common use, but
there is a kaleidoscope of product names that a lot of people
don't know," Wang Shoucong, deputy director of the ministry's
crop production department, told a news conference.

"We must control remaining pesticides to safeguard our
exports of agricultural products," he said, according to a Web
cast carried on the ministry's site (www.agri.gov.cn).

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China has been struggling to regulate its food production
system in the face of health and safety breaches that have
reverberated through its export markets, including in the
United States and Europe.

Much of China's food production takes places on small,
family farms, which often fall below regulators' radar screens.

Wang said his ministry would tighten registration
procedures for pesticides on the market, standardize packaging
regulations to ensure the list of ingredients was legible and
reduce the number of products on the shelves.

Otherwise, their quality and use was unclear to farmers,
meaning consequences for the environment and for the safety of
food and grain products.

"In this situation, farmers' use of pesticides is
ineffective and that inefficiency can cause losses," Cai Daoji,
of the Nanjing Environmental Studies Research Centre, told the
news conference.

China already banned five high toxicity pesticides as of
January 1, 2007, but experts say old stock is still in the
market, in the hands of traders, retailers and farmers
themselves.